When Sony Corp. launched its PlayStation 3 game console seven years ago, the firm face a number of problems, one of which was high price of the system and another one was poor yield of Cell processor, the heart of the PS3. With PlayStation 4 the company made a lot of decisions differently and now it hopes that the same issues that harmed success of the PS3 will not hurt the PS4.

"It is everything we can manufacture. We want to make sure that consumers have an opportunity to buy one on November 15 and through the holidays, so we are holding back some inventory to make sure that people have an opportunity to buy one that come in on launch day. But we can pre-sell every unit we can manufacture, and the good news is production yields have been phenomenal. So this will be by a magnitude of a lot the biggest launch we have ever had," said Jack Tretton, the president of Sony Computer Entertainment America, in an interview with Fox Business, reports Games Industry web-site.

When Sony developed PlayStation 4, it took a completely different design approach than it took with the PlayStation 3. Instead of using proprietary microprocessor designed in-house, the company decided to adopt industry-standard AMD x86 central processing unit. Sony also decided to utilize industry-standard GDDR5 memory instead of XDR DRAM and installed an industry-standard AMD Radeon graphics engine. As a result, it is not only easy do develop games for PlayStation 3, but it is much easier to manufacture it.

Back in August, Sony Computer Entertainment announced that it had received as many as one million pre-orders on PlayStation 4 game console.

While pre-orders naturally reflect huge interest towards the PS4 system, there will certainly be loads of people looking forward to buy their units in retail. Earlier this year financial analysts estimated that 2.5 million PlayStation 4 units and 2.3 million Xbox One units are to be shipped in Q4 2013. In case the numbers turn to be true, then the launch of next-gen consoles will be triumphal as never before in history of gaming sales have been so high.

Still, record sales at launch do not necessarily guarantee long-term success as early adopters are usually so-called core gamers, who may own more than one console and buy loads of games. Amateur and casual gamers may delay their purchases until systems get more affordable, or even skip consoles as other devices are gaining their gaming capabilities.

Sony PlayStation 4 is based on a semi-custom AMD Fusion system-on-chip that integrates eight AMD x86 Jaguar cores, custom AMD Radeon HD core with unified array of 18 AMD GCN-like compute units (1152 stream processors which collectively generate 1.84TFLOPS of computer power that can freely be applied to graphics, simulation tasks, or some mixture of the two), various special-purpose hardware blocks as well as multi-channel GDDR5 memory controller. The PS4 will come with 8GB of unified GDDR5 memory sub-system (with 176GB/s bandwidth) for both CPU and GPU as well as large-capacity hard disk drive.

Sony PS4 will be equipped with Blu-ray disc drive capable of reading BDs at 6x and DVDs at 8x speeds, USB 3.0 connectivity in addition to a proprietary aux port, Gigabit Ethernet port, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 EDR wireless technology as well as HDMI, optical and analog outputs. The new system will also utilize new DualShock 4 game controller with integrated touchpad as well as better motion sensing thanks to new PS4 tracking cameras (sold separately for $59).

The PlayStation4 (CUH-1000A series) computer entertainment system will launch on November 15, 2013 in the Canada and U.S., and from November 29, 2013 in Europe (PAL region) including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The PS4 will also launch in the following ten Latin American countries on November 29: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama and Peru.

When the PlayStation 4 will become available this year, it will be sold at a recommended retail price (RRP) of $399, CAD$399, €399, and £349.

Discussion

Secret behind this success-
1.Jaguar is very small core designed specially to reduce cost.
2.GCN is now 2year old design so every process complexity is now solved.
3. No embedded dram so lower die size means much better yields.
Sony is surely going to feel nice time with this new soc.

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still no official mention of the cpu and gpu speed though from sony. I wonder if this is another sony's secret weapon they are keeping hush hush about until it gets released. it would be awesome if both the cpu and gpu had a custom turbo mode that could jack the cpu and gpu speed way up if the chips weren't fully saturated like intels turbo boost.

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yes frnd u r right there r many secrets under the hood of PS4 reality is they r as same as their desktop siblings but completely unlocked and specified. real magical word is unlocked(i said everytime that GCN is something more than wat we know)other thing is native instructions like most rumored AMD-HCI(not official name) this is a killer instruction and currently locked by AMD and we will see that after 2014 when AMD enable that by OS upgrade.

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There is no hidden magic in the PS4 CPU or GPU. It's an off the shelf Pitcairn core with lower specs than 7870 but retains 7870's 256-bit bus and has slightly more memory bandwidth at 176GB/sec. They made slight revisions to compute but in the grand scheme of things developers won't even take advantage of those features in 3-4 years. By that time Volta will be 5-6x faster than the GPU in PS4.

The reason to buy a PS4 is for its exclusives not some next gen graphics. PC will continue to have the best performance and graphics. Even now BF4's settings had to be turned down to run on consoles.

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how do you know? there hasn't been anything mentioned in the clock speeds of the cpu or gpu yet in regards to it using some sort of turbo mode function. its not like that isn't anything amd can't implement seeing as they already use turbo mode on their bulldozer arch for years now dating all the way back to the phenom II 6 core series.

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It has been this way forever. The idea of a console is to have highly specific hardware that games can be optimized for. We didn't start seeing games hitting the edge of the last gen's capability until toward the end of the product cycle. A lot of that was memory issues. Using an x86 processor these new generation consoles should last for quite some time. That being said PC gaming will always have a slight edge.

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Older tech often offers a much better yield. These devices are made to use on a TV at 1920x1080 and frankly that's the limitation graphically. Also they will be hard capped to 60Hz max as that is all that the vast majority of modern TVs can cope with
Unless you have a 2560x1440 TV then 2 year old GFX hardware running the shaders, AA and AF technology that is available today just aren't going to be pushed.
It is a very sensible idea by Sony to limit what the processors can do to what the AV equipment it will be plugged into is capable of supporting. Any more would be a waste for 99% of PS4 buyers.
So while this is a long way short of bleeding edge technology (PC tech past this point about 2 years ago) it is the very best USE of technology. And at thge end of the day, that's all that really matters

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